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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29611764">The Unsung Predicament of Our Thoughts and Words.</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nuisan/pseuds/Nuisan'>Nuisan</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fate/Grand Order</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Character Study, Existential Crisis, Gen, I guess????, if fgo wont give me content I’ll make it myself</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 16:47:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,174</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29611764</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nuisan/pseuds/Nuisan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Under the silent gaze of the moon, one can gather so much of their thoughts. With the silent tranquility of the night around them, one can begin to reconcile with their other self.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Vlad III l Berserker &amp; Vlad III l Lancer (Fate/Extra)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Unsung Predicament of Our Thoughts and Words.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I was rereading Berserker Vlad’s interludes where he says that his memories are mixed with Dracula, had an idea and got a little carried away lmao. Anyway the Vlads are sad people, posting via mobile is awkward and I hope you enjoy.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Servants were given rooms they didn’t particularly need with utilities they didn’t necessarily require and they were given roommates some really didn’t want. But they humoured the wishes of the few remaining humans to treat them as something living, beyond a sentient weapon. It was charming, in a way, to be treated as if they were just as alive as the regular, everyday person.</p>
<p>It made for a subtle, comforting tempo beneath the imminent dread of the incineration of everything as humanity knew it. The domesticity of it all made for a breather between catastrophes, between tragedies. It made space for routines that could pose as a guise for normalcy in these otherwise deserted halls of metal and clean, harsh lights. </p>
<p>A routine, in concept, was a wonderfully grounding thing to have in such perilous times. But in practice, it was not always so calming but it was still grounding. Even if that anchor that stopped one from being swept up in sheer gravity of the ongoing battle was habitual irritation.</p>
<p>“At least give the brush a moment of your consideration,”his ‘other self’ would snip quietly as he dried his unruly, white hair. The more lithe figure of the two of them sitting cross-legged on one of the beds wedged into one corner of the bland room, hands and eyes occupied with whatever piece of needlework he had moved on to.</p>
<p>“Vanity is a sin in the eyes of the Lord,”the lancer would reply blankly. The sneer he usually backed his words with had melted away some time ago. It was energy he would rather conserve instead of arguing with the berserker incarnation of Vlad the Impaler.</p>
<p>Then it’d be a noise, a mix of a scoff and a chuckle. The berserker’s tongue was just as sharp as his spear, and just as ready too,”I’d hardly call making oneself look decent, vanity.”</p>
<p>There had been times when the grumbled words struck all the wrong chords in the lancer. Like striking flint, there had been quick sparks that caught on and burned up into a loud argument between both reincarnations of Vlad III. Quarrels that got loud enough and lasted long enough that their headless neighbour had personally tried to knock down their door to deliver a hand-written, rather rude note, scrawled in very angry German more than once. Said headless neighbour had quite the colourful vocabulary for someone who lacked the ability to speak beyond notes and hand gestures.</p>
<p>But that time had blown over like the ever raging winds outside of Chaldea’s walls. Then it would the one who called himself a soldier instead of a ruler that would huff in placated irritation at the king’s words but continue going about his business. There would rarely be any other words exchanged between them. Just a chilly, stiff silence that settled against their shoulders like a blanket that lacked any of the actually comforting aspects of a blanket. There was no need to speak, nor to argue. They may be the same person, but they rarely saw eye-to-eye on anything and they knew that very well so there was no need to continuously go poking at well established boundaries. Perhaps it could be classified as a special kind of self-hatred that one struggled to tolerate the other in conversation.</p>
<p>If it wasn’t self-hatred, neither cared to find the proper word, rather opting to ignore the problem. Instead the berserker would remain working on his embroidery in brooding silence as his lancer self knelt at his own bedside at the other corner of the room, hands clasped together as he offered up his daily prayers. When the white-haired warrior rose, the berserker would set down his needlecraft for the night at his nightstand before his much more pious self could turn the light off and he lose a needle or thread. In the little comfort the dark offered, they would lay down, backs facing one another from opposite corners. They’d stare at the plain steel wall before them in an unsaid competition to see who succumbed to rest first, one perfectly aware of the other’s state of consciousness and exactly when they nodded off.</p>
<p>It was a cold and thoroughly unfriendly, just as a clock worked. A clock continued to work as it should, uncaring if someone didn’t like what time it displayed or not, coldly factual in its own little mechanical way. Unfriendly in that same mechanical way of repetitive functionality, not straying from that function unless tampered with.</p>
<p>Servants don’t dream, this was a commonly known fact. They can however, sometimes relive moment of their lives through fuzzier details than what can be remembered in the waking hours. But when one’s life was riddled with the horrors of war and cursed by misfortune, reliving of memories acted just fine as a stand-in for nightmares. </p>
<p>The ‘dream’ of a woman, whose figure shifted into multiple familiar ones, jumping from a tower and into the unreachable murky unknown often jostled the lancer from his bed and then from his room. He was dully aware that his berserker self was also missing, but couldn’t find it in him to care.</p>
<p>Roaming the halls, one could scarcely tell that it was meant to night with the sterile white lights overhead. Only a small portion of the facility had those near floor-to-ceiling expanses of glass to show the endless expanse of pristine, untouched plains of snow being gazed upon by the soft glow of the moon. It wasn’t the first time the scruffy man had wandered out to these part to sit on a bench some of the other Servants had pushed up against the wall and stare at the moon for hours. He never preoccupied his hands with anything for once, the tranquility giving him the peace he needed to sift through his often muddled mind.</p>
<p>The moon felt special somehow, as if there was something or someone linking it to him. One of the nights where he tried, he could recall some warped, locked away memory of a woman so frail she made her own kind of radiance. A whisper somewhere else inside of him called her his wife, but his few shreds of rationality always reminded him that he had left his wife back in his own time. Was it all a trick then or was it fragments of something he wasn’t meant to remember? One part of him, deep down, berated him for not remembering a name or a face but the other part wasn’t sure what there was to remember. Minute upon hour of pondering at his silent compatriot in the sky never brought answers.</p>
<p>One time, and only once, he had allowed himself to step up to the glass and press his clawed gauntlets against it. He’d pressed against the confines, as if it were the only thing stopping him from reaching out and grasping the moon itself. The thing that stopped him was the hellish screeches his armoured fingers made against the glass. If someone had passed by him just then, they would’ve thought him mad. Perhaps, he thinks ruefully on more than one occasion, they were right to do so and that he had truly lost his mind.</p>
<p>He wondered, on even rarer occasions, if the berserker manifestation of himself felt the same. As though his body had been through experiences that his mind barely retained and had him doubt the integrity of his own thoughts.</p>
<p>If the king felt like that in any way, it never showed for much longer than a few rare moments in his cerulean eyes. He certainly didn’t look as if he’s thought that for a second, bathed in the moonlight as he was now, fingers still nimbly working on his needlework. The berserker showed the barest of reactions as his lancer self sat himself as far away as possible from him on the bench. He had only really spared him a passive glance that conveyed nothing.</p>
<p>Gazing at the moon didn’t bring the same sense of calmness when the mere presence of the blonde king’s aura prickled against his side. They’d established how so very little they cared for each other’s wellbeing, yet it felt as though his stubbornly unflinching company was both scrutiny and a form of solidarity. It should be solidarity in at least one way, shouldn’t it? They were the same person after all, the thrived in the same glory, suffered the same misfortunes and were slandered by the same vampiric legend. Did he also have glimpses of the woman in the long, striped sleeves from the moon?</p>
<p>“Why do you not pray?” The lancer kept his crimson eyes transfixed on the moon, deciding it was the better of the two options; that or his surprise company for his nightly musings. </p>
<p>The berserker’s words were measured carefully and delivered with a flat tone,”What is the sense?” </p>
<p>The lancer suppressed the growing need to scorn the other him,”Because it is asked of us.” To think that he would have to tell his own self that was absurd. It was absurd that his own self had never even seemed to consider coming to kneel beside him and offer their own prayers.</p>
<p>The berserker set his craft on his lap, eyes turning to him. It felt as if two daggers made just of ice was digging into the lancer’s side,”I just don’t think that a beast as unholy as myself should desecrate the Lord’s words.” There was holes to be torn in that logic. Was the lancer not as unholy as he was? Had he also not had his legacy changed to be a bloodsucking abomination after his death? Were his hands also not soaked in the blood of hundreds? Then why could he beg for forgiveness and yet his more regal self could not?</p>
<p>It was because the lancer could remember what made him unholy, what his legacy had been before being smeared, because he could remember dousing his hands in the blood of so many in service to his country. It was because the other him could not pray for something so insincerely. Was it really forgiveness for becoming what he is what he wanted to pray for, or was it to be freed from the reason for needing forgiveness? </p>
<p>The berserker was not the one who wanted to be rid of Dracula’s legend. He embodied it. The legend was him, and he was the legend. The truth was a bitter wound that ran under the surface of his physical being and stung what he guess was his soul.</p>
<p>That urge to fight off the appeal of draining his enemies of their blood came from a fragment of something lodged so deep in his chest that it barely felt as thought it came form him. He felt as thought that spark inside him should be a raging bonfire that burned bright enough to push his own ambitions for the grail. It was a hard thing to thing to grasp and even harder to come to terms with, but it felt as thought that jagged fragment of hatred for what he is belonged to the body he called his own, yet it felt as though him as a whole did not belong in this body. It was though he was holding something that did not belong to him, like he was using the identity of someone else for his own purposes.</p>
<p>If this body did not belong to him, then who did it belong to? Was it the ‘real’ him, the one who ruled as a vicious man of war, but completely human nonetheless?  Was it to the version of himself he caught at the edges of his vision in his reflection that looked at him with that look of miserable disgust for what he is? To the version of him whose golden eyes would flicker in the stead of his own blue ones if he stared too long at his own reflection? It was a disheartening experience to know he lived in a body whose owner despised him with undertones of fitful sorrow. One that he masked behind the bravado of a prideful king who thought himself above his station as a Servant.</p>
<p>There was a stillness to the silence that had settle between the pair of the same person. Not the same tense stiffness that lodged itself into the space between them when going along their nighttime routines in their shared quarters. It was far from peaceful, but it was just as far being the barely restrained hostility it usually was. It felt like neutral contentment of resignation. There was some sort of understanding gleamed from one another by just sitting within communicating distance of each other when it was not out of necessity. Even though they didn’t look at each other, one staring up at the moon and the other down and the decorated cloth in his hands, they had reached some kind of tentative middle-ground.</p>
<p>In a voice that was robbed of all its usual maniacal boisterousness and replaced with a softness that could be described as something melancholic,”Do you miss her?” He was talking about his wife. Their wife. Or perhaps he wasn’t. Maybe he was talking about the woman who he wished would descend from the moon to him.</p>
<p>The berserker gave him a sidelong glance,”We are the same person, are we not?” The question of a response to a question was just a smokescreen. He knew nothing of what his lancer self could be implying, but his lancer self knew nothing in turn of his dilemma. The bland rhetorical question was a cover, he merely alluded to the possibility that they should feel the same way and made no attempt to rid the words of their ambiguity. Moving that veil of omission would mean facing the fact that no, he didn’t miss his wife. Well, he did, but at the same time he didn’t. He knew there should be some pains in his undead heart that he should never meet his dear wife again, but it mostly just a knowing that he should be saddened rather than actually feeling sad.</p>
<p>Besides it didn’t feel right to mourn her. It didn’t feel like it was his place, like he was invading on some else’s privacy by doing so. The lancer manifestation of himself included in that, and he didn’t feel as though he needed to give him more fuel for the fire that was his discontent for his existence. It didn’t even sit right on his tongue to call the woman whose face he can’t even recall his wife. If he tried, and he had many a time, to manifest an image of her unhindered by misconceptions of her in his own mind. He always came up with a hazy image that looked only vaguely familiar. As if he were looking at someone through uncleared, stained glass.</p>
<p>The embroidery needle in his hand pricked one of his fingers, the droplet of blood soaking into the pale cloth he worked on easily. He stitched over the scarlet stain with black thread, hiding it away under a layer of the coloured string. </p>
<p>Wait.</p>
<p>Vlad III had taken two wives in his life. Which one was the lancer referring to?</p>
<p>Oh it didn’t matter, the berserker huffed in his private form of frustrating inner turmoil. The faces he knew he should know would morph into ones he had never seen if he focused on them. His wives, his son and the people he knew he should be considering the friends he had made in his lifetime all transformed to strangers he had never encountered. The strangers that occupied his memories, in the stead of the people he had actually met in his life, would sneer at him. In his ‘dreams’ they would hate him for things he never did and try to impale his heart with a stake. The bitter irony of it was not lost on him, but he sometimes wished it was.</p>
<p>There was a cynical, empty chuckle that weakly made it its way up from his chest only to die on the warrior’s tongue. The lancer echoed the words of his other self,”We are the same person, are we not?” There was something so greatly amusing to him about their existential problems. They were the same person yet this was the only ‘conversation’ they had ever had that didn’t dissolve into throwing jaded words laced with venom at each other. Was it because they both hated something about themselves so deeply that they lashed out the other, thinking it was the way to confront their internal problems? </p>
<p>Even with as much as his mind being lost, the lancer knew the not-so-much question he got in response to his own was worth as much as hot air. But he’d leave the berserker alone, just as he was huddled all to his cagey self. His sanity may be in a questionable state, but his perceptiveness remained the same as it had always been, and he had seen his berserker self retreat deep into his mind when he thought nobody would notice. Just like he was doing now.</p>
<p>Neither spoke for a long time after that, but they did not flee from each other’s company either. So they sat there, as far apart as they could get with the Vlad with unruly behaviour and appearance looking up at the moon and the Vlad with the air of faux arrogance looking down at the stitchwork he had long finished.</p>
<p>There was no spectacular change in the air between them, it hadn’t suddenly become a warm and inviting environment. It remained the same between them, the same stillness, the same expectation that neither would talk to the other. Yet, there was a change because the lancer didn’t feel like going at the berserker’s throat and the berserker didn’t feel like impaling the lancer with at least a dozen stakes. </p>
<p>“Will you still not consider giving a brush any sort of your attention?”</p>
<p>“Vanity is a sin the eyes of the Lord.”</p>
<p>There was the small, hopeful beginnings of a grin.</p>
<p>Nothing had changed between them. Things remained the ‘normal’ they had set it to, but ‘normal’ was not a static concept. It changed, destroyed and reconstructed itself over time, over experiences. Sometimes it changed for better or for worse, but it changed. Sometimes faster sometimes slower, but it changed. The silence between the two Vlads changed from from suffocatingly hostile to being tolerable. It was not a big change in the eyes of anyone else, but it was change. They didn’t know why things were changing between them now, after sitting still under the moonlight and exchanging minimal words. What understanding could be gained from getting tangled in the mess of one’s own thoughts in the company of one’s other self? Was the change waiting to happen for some time but had never had a proper catalyst for its own self until now?</p>
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